Here’s the second in the series from developer-cum -regiona-analysis-whiz Peter Mallow on correctly and realistically using economic impact methods — and avoiding getting fooled by The Number that they generate. ...
The fourth and final installment of the training series that Mark Barbash, Jim Kinnett and I have been doing for the Ohio City-County Manager Association will help you answer your ...
Urban planners and downtown revitalization or regeneration types have done a great job of embracing the value and potential of places that we might be tempted to overlook. The arcade-style ...
My old – but-not-so-old friend Bill Lutz wrote to me recently about his perceptions of how local governments should pursue community engagement, and as usual he brought a perspective and ...
Hi. My name is Della, and apparently I look like this: About every other week I discover that I have totally confused someone with my business. Yesterday it was a ...
We finally have the second podcast up in our mini-series on Sustainable Economic Development, produced in partnership with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab). This series features 14 professionals who participated ...
I’m delighted to announce a new partnership with PlannersWeb (the new online incarnation of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal) to share interviews with people who are leading us into the future of public ...
It might have something to do with me still being young enough to relate to the vibrant lifestyle of 20-somethings, but it has occurred to me that the field of ...
“This is not the planning profession John Nolen built. A century later, our great recession has sparked a full re-evaluation of what a city’s urban planning department should be ‘doing’ ...
People in Ohio tend to point to the Columbus suburb of Dublin as one of those places that has everything going for it: big houses, wealthy people, lots of high-paying ...
Just a quick note for you planning types that I’ll be doing two sessions (read: I am an idiot) at the American Planning Association’s annual conference next week in Chicago. ...
In a true display of democracy, a town hall meeting held at the New Bedford High School auditorium Monday gave the crowd of approximately 550 residents the opportunity to publicly ...
I wrote the following as a response to an ongoing debate on incentives that has been occurring on one of the LinkedIn groups that I follow. There’s been a strong ...
I’ve got a new item in the Workshop that I’d like your feedback on. My friend and collaborator Pete Mallow took an initial stab at trying to identify the types ...
Sometimes you have to force yourself to walk with your ghosts so that you know who they are. And who you are, too. I always say that I am ...
As we rethink how we do economic development, we need to give up the idea that the primary way to grow a local economy is through business recruitment. As much ...
Ask any civic leader the number one thing they want for their town and “jobs,” economic development, is what they … http://pulse.me/s/jhGdU If you are not reading the Urbanophile, I ...
Matthew Tuerk (@matthewtuerk) tweeted at 10:15 PM on Wed, Mar 13, 2013: old, white guys http://t.co/8DpPe4nclQ #econdevREV #mansplaining Economic development as an industry has known about its “old white guy” ...
This annotated presentation comes from a training I did for the Introduction to Economic Development course hosted by the Ohio Economic Development Association last week. I had the session on ...
I’m excited today to introduce a new guest blogger, Peter Mallow. Pete’s a one of a kind. Really? Really. How many people do you know who have developed subdivisions, fought ...
I wanted to share with you a great essay from CEOs for Cities that gets at one of the issues that worries me the most: our tendency to oversimplify our ...
It’s no secret by now that Piqua, Ohio, is one of my favorite examples of a little city that consistently figures out How To Get It Done – thanks in ...
Good LinkedIn discussions are like sitting in on a dinner with bright and insightful people from all over the world (without trying to decide how to split the check). ...
I’m delighted today to launch a new podcast mini-series with MIT CoLab’s GEDI (Green Economic Development Initiative). In 2012, CoLab hosted 14 Mel King Community Fellows, mid-career professionals from across ...
One of the ongoing challenges for anyone involved in online public engagement is determining which comments on an online platform warrant a response, and which ones… well, don’t, for whatever ...
I’m delighted to introduce you to a new blogger who will hopefully be submitting to the Wise Economy. Matthew Buccelli is a recent Georgetown grad who has impressed me with ...
When you work in community revitalization, you find yourself telling a few stories over and over again, because they so beatifully sum up the possibilities that struggling communities can’t always ...
I’ve been looking forward to doing and sharing this interview since back before I started podcasting – and the timing couldn’t be better, because this community just won the American ...
This week’s posts are going to primarily reflect what I heard at last week’s IEDC Leadership Summit, which I think has the potential to turn out to be a sea ...
I promised a couple of folks that I would write some blog entries trying to capture what I am hearing at the IEDC Leadership Conference in Orlando. So what follows ...
This podcast features one of the speakers that I have most enjoyed lately — Kathleen Norris of the Cincinnati-based, world-oriented retail real estate consulting and brokerage firm Urban Fast Forward. ...
I’m delighted to invite you to my third training session with Mark Barbash and Jim Kinnett: Creative Financing to Help Create Economic Development. We hope you will join us for an ...
OK. So we know that economic development incentives can have some benefit, but we also know that easily become too reliant on them. We have too often viewed economic development ...
We have this deep-seated desire to believe that experts can hand us answers. We spend huge sums on consultants (the ones who claim to have 937 years of combined experience) ...
Oy. Trying to craft a cogent and fair assessment of the incentives issue and the responsibilities of those of us who care about communities is feeling like the Gorgon’s knot…you ...
We’ve been picking up the ongoing debate over economic development incentives this week, starting with insights from Bill Lutz on analyzing the results of incentives and from Kathy Dodson on ...
Back in the end of 2012, as most of you reading this know, the New York Times kicked off a firestorm in the economic development world by digging deeply into ...
I have an longstanding obsession with understanding how decisions get made in complex environments, and how we can make better decisions in local government, non-profit and business settings. (Hey, I ...
2013 is starting off pretty well for Northwestern University alumni like my husband and myself. For those of you not in the US, Northwestern is a relatively small, private, intensely ...
About a month ago, I posted an article asking for help explaining whether economic development makes a difference — understanding and articulating the role that sales and marketing should play ...
This presentation was given to several organizations this fall, and it was designed to highlight the need for a fundamental shift in thinking about economic development initiatives — shifting from ...
One of my regular correspondents is Charley Bowman, a career city administrator and now managing partner of Economic Development Data Services. Charley sent me this comment last week in response to my annotated ...
The link below will take you to our new white paper about online public engagement platforms that are available commercially in the United States. We will be updating this white ...
Who is Clay Shirky? The heck if I know. Actually that’s not true anymore. After Jennifer Palka of Code For America tweeted a TED video and marked it as ...
My next training session with Mark Barbash and Jim Kinnett is now open for registration. This one is on “Using Incentives the Right Way for Your Community,” and it will ...
My oftentime contributor Bill Lutz pointed out to me the other day, as part of a conversation about how traditional economic development methods often don’t seem to be working well, ...
At long last, here are the annotated slides from the presentation that Peter Mallow and I did on deciphering an economic impact study and finding the key assumptions and trigger ...
Talk about fascinating… One of the most successful community development corporations in the country once has a balance sheet of zero. What do you do to help an organization like ...
![Consultant as wizard: [expletive deleted]](http://wiseeconomy.com/wp-content/themes/UltraBusiness/functions/timthumb.php?src=http://wiseeconomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wiz-of-oz.jpg&h=120&w=120&s=1)
It’s very hard to type and pace around fuming at the same time. I just left a session at a national conference that shall remain unnamed. I left because I ...
We have a big sleeper challenge when it comes to building small business ecosystems: for many of our communities’ most valuable workers, the very nature of being employed looks nothing ...
Just a brief reminder that if you’re interested in registering for the training on New Trends in Economic Development, sponsored by the Ohio City-County Manager Association…. Well, you better do ...
Not sure if you can hear my own bouncing up and down through this podcast – my old friend Lara Fritts, the Executive Director of the Annapolis Economic Development Corporation, ...
On September 13, I will be doing a first-of-its-kind training with Mark Barbash and Jim Kinnett on New Trends in Economic Development: Setting your Community up for Success. Sponsored by ...
Fall is coming, and that means…it’s time to book hotels. Here’s the current schedule of speaking gigs, conferences and other assorted fun-ness in the last quarter of 2012: ...
Hi. My name is Della, and I work with engineers. I also married one. Anyone know of a good support group? Engineers have a unique handle on the world, ...
What is it about human character that makes it so easy for us to judge one another? It is so easy, dangerously easy sometimes, for us to assume that we ...
My good friends at Delib (“Hi, we’re Delib, and we’re a digital democracy company”) did a very nice interview with me this week. I like all of the online public ...
One of my clients found itself this week at one of those standing-on-the-precipice moment: In this project, are we creating an evolution, or a revolution? This community is well into ...
Don’t loan me a book. At least, don’t loan me a book unless you’re willing to get it back with pencil scribbles all over it. Just ask my husband. In ...
It’s a tough challenge that I keep laying out with this Wise Economy thing. If you share my belief that the realities of the world and communities around us require ...
When you’re a woman who writes and speaks her opinions about issues, there’s a certain voice in the back of your head that pushes back any time you’re inclined to ...
Readers of this blog know that I have a deep admiration of Umair Hacque, an economist and a great writer who has done one of the best jobs I have ...
One of my ongoing frustrations within the public engagement practice of the Wise Economy Workshop is the assumption in some corners that good public engagement means letting people recommend or ...
For those of you attending the Ohio City-County Manager’s association presentation today, here is a link to the presentation, in case you want to follow along. Gold star for you! ...
I’ve referenced a guy named Umair Hacque on here before, and if you haven’t taken the hint and started reading his stuff yet, you should. If anyone is thinking and ...
For those of you who attended my session on public participation at the workshop, I promised to post the links to the various online public participation and planning tools that ...
I put a post on my Google+ profile this morning calling attention to an article Richard Florida did for the Atlantic. Florida does a nice job here of summarizing ...
Another trait that distinguishes a wise person – and is a hallmark of a Wise Economy– is thinking ahead about the full range of potential outcomes of a decision. A wise ...
Last week I said: I’d like to say that the premise behind the “Wise” part of the Wise Economy was exhaustively researched and analytically founded…but it’s not. It’s mostly a ...
A few months ago, I received a wonderful invitation from the publisher of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal to start writing a regular column. The first one appears in the Spring ...
The lesson for today, girls and boys, is that you’re most likely to find the insights you’re looking for in the place where you aren’t looking. I have struggled for ...
I am getting excited about the prospect of meeting you all at the Michigan Small Town and Rural Development Conference at Crystal Mountain in Thompsonville April 18-20! As I said ...
Stop it. Just stop it. Are you trying to sound like children squabbling on the playground? I know you’re going to say the other side started it, it’s not my ...
We all know that most of our local economies are in some form or another of mess. Draw the border around your town, your county, your region, your state, doesn’t ...
Gruen’s Grand Idea One of the news stories that has been circling the twittersphere lately is an interview with Andreas Duany in which he asserts that public participation requirements are ...
This is a follow-up to my post a couple of weeks ago about community goal-setting (what should I make of the fact that the post with “ice cream” in the ...
I am delighted to announce that I am starting a new firm, which will be known as the Wise Economy Workshop. WEW will help local governments plan for bright economic ...
Comprehensive planning gets a bad rap- one that it has partially, although not completely, deserved. In the past few years I seem to encounter more and more clients who are either trying to avoid ...
Vacations are a wonderful thing… it’s a rare occasion for me to finish a book anymore (reports, yes, books… a different situation), but thanks to a long flight I was ...
Last Saturday my kids set up a lemomade stand on the street in front of my house. I wanted to encourage them to do it for all the usual good ...
I am writing this from a conference, listening to the keynote speaker, and feeling pretty discouraged. The speaker’s premise is one that I defintely support: Locally-grown businesses are critical to local ...
There was another sign yesterday that our local economies are undergoing a significant shift: Colliers reports that the market for development of new retail facilities has come almost to a standstill, ...
“Clustering” is one of those magic wizard ideas in economic development. Everyone knows that business clusters are good things, that somehow they make economies work better, but when someone asks ...
As the National Main Street Conference continues, I’ve been talking a lot with Eric Model of Journeys Into on SIRIUS-XM about some exciting, inexpensive opportunities to promote the things that ...
Another sign of the general oversupply of retail space in the US — and the opportunities this might provide. This article highlights a couple of retail real estate developers who ...
First, thanks again to everyone who participated in the session on sustainable economic development at the APA National Conference in New Orleans. I am still shocked so many of you ...
A blog post from the Harvard Business Review (always worth seeing what the smarties are up to) makes a point about managing a job hunt, but it’s also relevant to ...
Planning Commissioner’s Journal usually finds something interesting and relevant to say, and this 2006 article by Hannah Twadell that was recently reposted remains relevant: Corridors link communities. And sometimes the ...
I have become increasingly convinced that microenterprise is one of the most effective low-cost ways to build the business base, especially in disadvantaged communities. Microenterprises can make a little money ...
Here’s an idea that’s beautiful in its simplicity. Won’t work everywhere, and not a magic bullet, but it’s one of the hundreds of small good ideas that make a healthy ...
After my last post about the OKI Fiscal Impact Model, I received several great comments. One of them reflected on past experience with a per capita fiscal impact model in ...
We all live in boxes. We all operate on the unspoken assumption that the options available to us are constrained, are limited by something or someone. And those constraints limit ...
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2009/11/clevelands_euclid_corridor_pro.html Truth in advertising: even after 20+ years out of the region, I am still a huge Cleveland fan (the city, I mean — I gave up on the Browns ...
Agenda 360, the Cincinnati-area initiative to catalyze regional growth, has announced a goal of creating 200,000 net new jobs in the next 10 years. A description, and a link to ...
OK, a short one for Thanksgiving eve. This graphic from N-Judah Love Song says it all — and this applies both to us individually and to our communities. Sometimes you ...
I spent way too much time writing this response on ULI’s LinkedIn group to my post on seeking opportunties to not put it here, too! Charles Brenton of Brenton Associates wrote: “Seeing ...
Just a brief thought: I really hate having my plans disrupted — I have a sick kid right now, and the last 24 hours have been a mad chase to ...
As I discussed in this post, I have spent most of my adult life thinking about how to deal with the impacts that economic change has on the health and ...
As I outlined in the last post on this topic, OKI’s Fiscal Impact Model was designed to provide every community in the OKI region with an off-the-rack option for fiscal ...
One of the biggest challenges in local government economics, and I would say one of the most important ones, is understanding the fiscal impacts of the kinds of things that get built ...
I get NO credit for this list… this was created by contributors to the Indiana APA listserv last Friday.. too good not to publicize! : Top 9 reasons I am ...
I am not a very dedicated “greenie” (as evidenced by amount of petroleum tied up in Legos in my house), but I think the Midwest governors might be on to ...
I started my professional life as a cultural resources consultant in northern Wisconsin (ok, that wasn’t quite the start, but it’s a long story…). During that time I had the ...
How can a place like this be fixed? That is the question that has driven my career. I grew up in a Cleveland suburb watching the rippling impacts of closing ...
